Infinite Possibilities: Ken Levine

These days, Ken Levine is getting
back to the proverbial drawing board. During his periodic five-hour walks with Andres Gonzalez, the lead level designer on BioShock Infinite:
Burial at Sea, the pair ponder gaming’s more nebulous questions. Do game narratives need to
be linear? Can designers give players the power to rearrange and customize
storylines? Would players respond to that at all? Seven months after the shutdown of Irrational
Games, the powerhouse studio
best known for developing the BioShock franchise, the company’s co-founder is focusing on
the fundamentals—a pared-down staff, an upcoming game in extremely
early development phase, and a reassessment of the core principles of narrative
design. At his to-be-named new studio, Levine is on a mission to expand
plot-driven games by breaking the story into “Narrative Lego” the player can impact. From
there, the bite-sized narrative bits will systemically rearrange themselves to
create a larger unique narrative. It’s a dangerous experiment, one that could very well
prove commercially unsuccessful despite Levine’s hefty industry accolades, but it’s also an endeavor that could
put the player into the creator’s chair and change the way we interact with games.

Get In Media: What challenges does implementing a Narrative Lego
framework present?

Ken Levine: If you break down a game like BioShock Infinite
to its most basic level, story happens when you cross a certain trigger point
and we run essentially a narrative sequence of some kind. That can be in engine
or out of engine, or a player can be locked in place or not be, but still you’re waiting for a known story
element to play out. You have to change how you think about it: “OK, the story I have in my
head, I can’t
really tell a specific story because I’m not going to force the player down a specific path.”

What you’re really doing is breaking
down the narrative. … We’re thinking of story more as
scenario, a situation where a bunch of things can come out of it. It’s probably better to think of
a TV show than a movie. Say you start at the beginning of Breaking Bad. The
scenario is you have a world, a city that’s highly involved in drug trafficking. You have a
character who has found out he’s dying of cancer and wants to provide for his family.
He has a brother-in-law who’s a DEA [agent]. He has a marriage that’s sort of losing its spark.
He has a kid with some physical challenges who is going to need probably extra
money to make sure he’s OK. He has a ride-along seeing the drug world and he
realizes … maybe he can make money improving on the product that
the drug lords are making using his chemistry abilities. That’s a scenario in which a
million different potential stories can roll out of. There are dozens and
dozens of stories that rolled out from the actual show, and if you sat down you
could probably make up hundreds more stories that could roll out of that exact
scenario, that exact set up.

[In our upcoming game] we started
building out the potential, like who are the characters in this scenario? What
are the conflicts in this scenario? What can the player do to push and pull on
the characters in this scenario? … It’s really about a broad range
of characters, a broad range of conflicting passions. We think of zero-sum
games between passions, like obviously the passions of Tuco, the drug lord in Breaking
Bad, and the passions of Hank, the DEA agent, are very, very different.
They’re
competing and there’s a zero-sum game there where the passions of Walter,
some tie in with Tuco’s passions and some tie in with his brother-in-law’s passions. …

Finding those interesting sets of
characters, that interesting set of conflicting and overlapping passions, and
setting the player loose as a person who can affect those in the world is
something we find very interesting. I don’t think it’s going to work if you just either approach it as a
linear narrative or you approach it as, OK, here’s a bunch of branches. You have to break down the
narrative impulses into their smallest coherent chunk and build those and then
have those, like any other systemic game, be able to interact with each other
in lots of interesting ways. …

Photo Credit: Ben Leuner/AMC

GIM: Does having that open-endedness and giving the player
that power create problems in terms of establishing the size of the game?

KL: Yeah. … We are heavily invested in
thinking about that when we make certain decisions on the design. We have a
fair amount of thinking already about the math that will yield. How many
potential narrative chunks, a Lego as it were, how many chunks is this decision
going to yield? We’re sort of thinking of the game as … different
towns that are essentially different factions. There’s lots of mixed allegiances
within each of these towns, but you’re interacting with them. We’re sort of thinking it’s three towns, three major
characters in each town or village, [and] every time you add in a character,
guess what happens to the amount of content you have to create? It goes
substantially up. We actually have guys talking about things like factorials
and things like that, math I don’t really understand, but fortunately it yields a
number for me of how many lines I’d have to write. … That said, you have to have
enough content so the experience is really meaningful and really rich and
really deep, but you also can’t put yourself in a situation where you can literally
spin out of control and set yourself to write an unwritable amount of content. …

Knowing that from the beginning,
knowing that you’re heading into something very dangerous, is important,
and on a smaller team we already set up a bunch of what we call pillars for the
game. … Pillars are the core principals of the game, and we
have about four pillars for the game. Any time you make a decision, you have to
look back at those pillars and say, “How supportive of one of those pillars is this design
decision?” If it’s not supportive of the decision and it’s expensive to make, it’s going to take a lot of time
and resources to make, it’s probably the wrong decision for the game. … It’s a way to keep you from
creeping in features by establishing these pillars and sort of always asking
yourself how to tie into the pillars. The number 2 pillar of this game is
making a game that has a meaningful, re-playable narrative. …

GIM: Do you have any way of estimating what adding a
narrative chunk does to the size of the game?

KL: Fortunately, my lead designer and my lead tech guy,
they both come from an engineering background, and one of the reasons that’s valuable is that they’re already very much thinking,
as we make design decisions, how we model what the impact on the amount of
narrative we’re
going to have to create. We think about how many characters [and] how many
different passions. … What are these things that
the characters care about? For instance, Walter White’s passion is taking care of
his family. That’s a big passion. If you help him with that, he’s going to like you. If you
don’t help
with that, he’s going
to like you less. Every passion you add is more content, and then if you have a
character with a zero-sum game with another character, say Tuco and Hank [with conflicting
passions] … if you can keep those zero sums aligned, meaning if it
makes Hank like you one unit more, it makes Tuco like you one unit less, that’s what you call zero-sum game
alignment. You know that if Hank is on this point of liking you on this
passion, Tuco is always at the inverse point numerically. That gives you a
smaller amount of content you have to create because it limits the number of
states along that passion.

We were having this discussion
about the communication of information in the game. When you take an action
that’s going
to make someone like you more or dislike you more, is there a way for you to
intercept the message? Think about Game of Thrones. Remember how they’re always shooting down the
[ravens] in Game of Thrones to keep information from getting to their
enemies or to their friends? Do you have a system where there’s some way where you can
impact the information world to intercept messages so you can do things that
people may not like but they’ll never hear about it? … If I do an action that Hank
is going to like and Tuco is going to not like and the information gets to Tuco
and not Hank, if you have a way of stopping information then the problem is
that they’re
going to then be unaligned on their feelings about it. They’re going to be not
necessarily at the inverse … therefore your potential
state, your narrative state related to those two characters in this one
passion, is out of sync and that essentially creates another state that you
have to support. …

GIM: Finances are a huge challenge for young developers.
When you are working on a blockbuster franchise, are finances still a hurdle?

KL: Part of the reason I’m doing something different in looking into the
future, I do have some questions. … BioShock Infinite and BioShock were fortunate to be linear
single-player narrative games that still sold really well and made money, [but]
they don’t
really have re-playability. … Each second of linear narrative is very, very
expensive to produce. I won’t be lying when I say that looking into the future,
one of my motivations for thinking about narrative and thinking about re-playability
in narrative is, as a narrative guy, as a person who loves narrative, I was
worried that to some degree we’re going to price ourselves out of existence. That
could happen.

The middle tier game is
disappearing. …People
tend to buy, especially on the console side, the biggest super big titles: the GTAs
and the Call of Dutys. They’re not really buying a lot of the midrange stuff. … The amount of numbers you
have to move to be successful in the midrange is getting higher and higher
because the costs are going up. Where people are having success is on the more
independent side, making smaller passion projects that rely more on innovation
and freshness of vision than they do on scale and scope and raw muscle of, “Here’s a ton of stuff. Great, cut
scenes.” That stuff is all great. I’m not criticizing any of it,
but narrative, unless you have a huge, huge 25 million seller, I think is
becoming a more challenging proposition to make economical sense. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing this, is to find a
way that narrative can be re-playable, hopefully having hundreds of hours of
gameplay without having to spend that minute-per-minute cost that you
traditionally see in making a narrative. …

GIM: For a student who really has no portfolio and no contacts in the industry, what do they need to
build their resume?

KL: They need to work on things and ship them. I think the
way they do that first is what can you do now that can help you demonstrate
your capabilities? What mods are out there? What can you make on your own?
Anything you can make that can demonstrate I can make something, even if it’s crude, even if it’s not super polished or doesn’t have great artwork. There
are millions of people out there now … who want to make stuff. There
are tools that exist to help you, whether it’s Unity or Unreal or whatever, that will help you get so far down the field.

If you’re not a technical person,
you need to align yourself with a technical person. There are a million people
out there who want to make stuff, a million people, and you’re going to deal with
frustration, especially if you’re working with a bunch of people casually and they’re not being paid. People are
going to flake out and they’re not going to perform, but it’s no different than a young
filmmaker who wants to get started and [is] making small things with his
friends. Let me tell you, I’ve made those things. People don’t show up. People disappear.
Your lead actor gets arrested. Terrible, annoying, horrible things will happen and generally the prize goes to
the guy or girl who sticks it out, who says, “OK, I’m going to make this thing and I don’t care what happens. I’m going to make something and
I’m going
to demonstrate my quality to people.”

The way people will be convinced
to hire you is they’ll see something of yours and they’ll be like, “Oh my god, how can I not have
this person at the company?” But they’re not going to probably find
that beauty hidden within you. …

GIM: Do you have any trepidation about trying to change how
story is delivered in games?

KL: There’s always a
reasonable chance of, we’ll try to put it up on its feet and what if it’s terrible? What if it absolutely is not interesting
at all? That’s less of an issue if you’re making a BioShock game. Having done a System Shock game, System
Shock 2, [BioShock] Infinite, you feel that there are things you can fall back on.
At least you won’t completely fall on your face when you’re starting out the project, where here we don’t really have that security.

…You may
look back at this article and say, “Wow, I should have warned that dude, because he was
about to really fail horribly. I should have said something.” It’s always
a possibility when you’re working in a new space, but we never made a game on
console before BioShock and we were worried about that. We had done a
game before that actually never came out, that we pulled from the market. … We were
fortunate that we were able to pull it and not ask the audience to play our
failed experiment. There were a lot of good things about it, but in the end it
was our failure. Nobody wants to go through that, but if you don’t risk things you just end up in stasis and you end up
being the guy creating the same number 12 of the series. You’re not challenging yourself any more. Listen, I
totally get why people do that. It must be very comfortable and there’s often a lot of money in it. I don’t really want a life where I’m super
comfortable going to work every day knowing exactly what I’m making.